Millennial Lecture at the Muskie Archives – 2000 – Bates College, Maine
Here’s the cleaned-up transcript:
[Introduction by Jim]
Dr. Seymour Papert: Well, thank you, Jim. I don’t know how to live up to that, but what can we do except try.
I guess this week the question to ask in Maine is: “Why should every seventh grader have a laptop computer?” The short answer is, every seventh grader should have a laptop computer because everybody should have a laptop computer. And why? Again, the short answer is, “Well, I have one.”
[Audio cut — audience laughter]
I couldn’t get to do a quarter of the things I do without it, and everybody I know — with very, very few exceptions — engaged in any sort of intellectual creative work: writers, artists, historians, mathematicians. They have and use these things, so it seems obvious that it’s the prime instrument of our day for intellectual work.
Now, you might not think that the work of kids is intellectual. If you don’t think that, that’s why we’re in such trouble. It is and ought to be, and so they ought to have this instrument. Having said that, we turn to the longer answer — including why is it that anybody would resist this? Why would it occur to anybody to deprive them of this intellectual tool, since many of the people who would deprive them of it would protest vehemently if we tried to deprive them of their own computers?
My long answer starts with why there’s such conservatism about school. I diagnose the situation of schools, and all the trouble that schools are in, in a very simple way: society has moved very fast, school has moved very sluggishly. The gap between school and society increases and increases. Kids are highly aware of this gap. School is out of sync with the world they’re in. They don’t buy into the idea that school is what prepares them for the real world — it just doesn’t match the real world they see.
That disparity is showing itself in the state of Maine. Whether it’s nearly 30% or nearly 50% — I can’t keep the numbers straight — but whatever it is, it’s shocking: that proportion of our children have some contact with special education at some point in their school careers. Our school systems are being strangled by the cost of this curious epidemic of learning disability.
Pretty amazing — there wasn’t any such thing 30 years ago. It’s like the AIDS epidemic that sprang from — well, we know where that one sprang from, although it took a long time to find out. Perhaps we need to spend as much time and effort finding out where this epidemic comes from.
There’s a notion — ah, I’ve forgotten what it’s called — diseases caused by doctors. At the beginning of modern medicine, there were experiments demonstrating, against the resistance of the medical profession and of the whole world, that doctors were in fact infecting patients from one to the next, and nobody knew it. Analysis of that phenomenon led to the revolutionary idea: at least wash your hands before you touch the next patient.
I think our problems with kids are caused by something wrong with our schools. It’s not our kids who are troubled — it’s our schools that are in trouble. But notice what we do about it. Almost to a person, these days, what we do is say, “Let’s go back to the old way. Let’s move school back to where it was and undo the small amount that school has changed” — thereby exacerbating rather than curing the problem.
You see the same thing on the individual level. This morning I heard from Mr. Gary Stager — who’s there with the camera, working with me on a project at the Maine Youth Center, where we have a group of very troubled kids, some of whom have been in trouble at school since the beginning. I’m seeing some kids there who were diagnosed early with learning disabilities and placed in special ed classes, and the following phenomenon occurs.
The kid comes to school with their mind full of imagination, wanting to learn, wanting to understand — and school tries to put that mind into a straitjacket. The mind resists. And the kid with the biggest imagination, the greatest desire to learn, and the greatest intellectual honesty — because this kid won’t give the “right” answers just because they were told to — is very often the one who has the worst trouble with school. Bored to tears, constrained, frustrated, doing badly.
So what do we do? We say: “This kid has a learning disability, so school work is too hard — let’s give him easier things to do.” We put him in a special class with only easy things to do, so he becomes more bored, more frustrated, and the downward spiral continues. The number of kids in special ed increases year after year until it will swallow the whole system unless something changes.
This is our crisis. Now, if you don’t recognize that the school system is in crisis, maybe everything I’m going to say is irrelevant — because you think everything’s fine. This is typical of systems in a state of collapse: the people who like them think they’re fine until it collapses around their ears.
I’ve often made the analogy with the Soviet Union, where that system was collapsing and we were all taken in — as much as they were — that this was a strong, powerful, and rich enemy, when in fact it was falling to pieces, rotten to the core. Even when they began to recognize in the ’80s, in the time of Gorbachev, that things were bad, they still tried to fix the little faults without changing the fundamentals.
That is exactly what we’re doing — using the same word “restructuring,” which translates into Russian as Perestroika. And this, I think, is a second cause of our crisis in schools: we refuse to recognize it, and when we do, we think we can fix it by patching here and there.
What else could we do? In a paper recently written for the National Governors Association by myself and Governor Gaston Caperton of West Virginia — who, I think, can be credited with creating what I hope will be the second-biggest statewide installation of computers in schools — we wrote about what’s wrong and what’s missing in education.
You’ll find it on a website:
[Writes papert.org on the chalkboard]
There we examine the many proposed causes. People say it’s a lack of funding, a lack of research, a lack of teachers. We suggest another: a lack of vision. And I’d like to emphasize what I mean by asking how many of you have seriously tried to conjure up an image of what learning might be like in 20 years.
Let’s be serious about it. Imagine a child who grew up in a home with computers from the day they came to consciousness. This child is used to — there’s no end to it. At dinner this evening, someone mentioned that right now, at this very instant, there are websites with cameras at watering holes across Africa. Nobody’s operating them; it’s direct contact with nature. You can look in and maybe see nothing, or maybe see a lion. There’s no end — anything could appear. Cameras just sitting there, pouring information into the web, which you can tap into at any time.
Suppose you’ve grown up with that kind of experience, and you come and sit down in first grade, and they open a textbook with a few small pictures of places in the world — the so-called Geography curriculum.
What do you say? “What’s this?” You won’t sit for it. It does not make sense for us to think we can continue business as usual, fixing a few faults, patching a few leaks in the roof. We need something radically different — and we’re going to have something radically different. That’s not really our choice anymore, any more than it was the choice facing Gorbachev.
Something radically different was going to happen. What they had a choice about — and got wrong — was whether to wait for things to tumble around their ears and then reconstruct from the wreckage, or to take their heads out of the sand, see that something very different was coming, and try to anticipate it. To understand what’s fundamentally different between what we’re doing now and what might be possible in the future, and to at least run some experiments, some serious steps toward it.
Let me use an analogy I’m very fond of. Imagine a world in which writing had not yet been invented, but they had schools — everything oral, people taught. One day writing was invented, and they made chalk and pencils and pens. Somebody said, “Wouldn’t it be a great idea to give kids pencils so they could learn much better?”
People say, “Go cautiously. We’ll put one pencil in every classroom and see if it improves learning, and if so, we’ll put in two.”
The others say, “No, don’t do that at all. We’d rather have a special room with a big pile of pencils. Kids will go there for an hour —”
[Audience laughter]
We laugh at that, yes, but we’re doing it. We’re doing exactly that with computers.
No doubt, ingenious teachers, parents, and kids would invent some wonderful things to do with those pencils — just as we see in thousands of schools, tens of thousands of teachers and hundreds of thousands of kids doing wonderful things with their limited access to computers. But what they’d do with the pencils bears no relation to the role of writing in our lives. A child growing up in our society has a pencil as part of life from babyhood — scribbling on walls, annoying their mother — and then it’s used for everything: writing, calculating, drawing, trading. It’s woven into the fabric of life.
I think there’s no doubt that computers are moving into that same kind of status. And the only way we can feel what it’s like to go along with that flow is to do it. To do it, we have to do something. The idea that every kid should have a computer — outside the restraining confines of school — is perhaps an essential part of any sensible way to anticipate that future.
It breaks down the barrier between school and home. It breaks down the aspect of our school world that I see as most like the cause of the breakdown of the Soviet system. That system could not work — increasingly, in a modern world, could not work — because of its command nature, its centralized nature. An economy based on a committee somewhere called Gosplan deciding what you would make, what you would do, what job you’d have — right through the whole society. This could sort of work in the early, simple stages of industrial society, though even then it was pretty bad. And it got worse and worse.
We try to do this with our education system. We have a curriculum somewhere that lays down what you learn, when, and how. It’s an exaggeration to say it specifies that you will learn this on May 7th because that’s the appropriate day — but only a slight exaggeration.
I’d like to offer a different image of organizing learning. We’re living in a complex and rapidly changing world. In such a world, what you need is individual initiative — people who can identify a problem, find an idea, try it, and not be devastated if it doesn’t work, but try something else or fix it. There was perhaps a time when it was right to say our schools should produce kids who can demonstrate they can do what they were taught to do.
No longer. We’re living in a world where half the people in the United States are doing jobs that didn’t exist when they were born. If this state is going to have the economic future its natural resources and people deserve, we’ll need a situation where 90% of its people are doing jobs that didn’t exist when they were in school. Under those conditions, the goal has to change. Not that they can do what they were taught to do — because nobody knows what they’ll need to do and can’t teach it in advance.
What we need is to produce people who can do what they were not taught to do. How do you build an education system that produces that? We need a different approach to flexibility, to initiative, and for that matter to assessment.
It seems horrific to me that we try to translate the excellent Maine Learning Results — excellent in its general principles — into a test where children spend day after day answering little detailed questions. Why not put them in a situation where they face something totally new, something nobody has ever seen, and we ask: how do you handle it? If you can, you pass. If you can’t, go try again. That would be a different kind of assessment, and that’s what we’ll need to learn to do.
It’s not going to be easy to shift schools in that direction, which is exactly why we have to break down the idea that innovation and learning happen only in school. School is never going to be flexible enough, in the foreseeable future, to run those kinds of experiments.
So now I’d like to use another analogy that’s almost become my signature recently. The biggest thing I’m campaigning for these days starts with this story: when I was a kid, there was no concept called “environmentalist.” There was “environment,” but it meant much simpler things. The idea of the earth, the water, the forests, the air, the whole planet as a system whose health could be in danger — that didn’t exist as a concept.
We knew some of the problems. A polluted river here, soil erosion there, fog over there — but these were isolated, separate problems handled by separate specialists. There was no profession concerned with the whole.
Then in 1962, there was a seminal book by Rachel Carson called Silent Spring, which seeded something. That a single book could have such an impact meant the world was already ready. Like when a supersaturated atmosphere needs just one snowflake to precipitate a storm — the world was ready, and environmentalism came quickly. I was struck by small things: when I was a kid, my mother might have said, “Turn off the light to save money.” Today kids say to their parents, “Turn off the light to save the planet.” A big difference in thinking.
I believe we are at a similar moment in relation to learning. I don’t have a perfect name for it yet — “learning environmentalism,” the “learning environment” — but the idea is that we need a more holistic, unfragmented way of thinking about learning. Right now there are experts in parenting, in infant learning, in preschool learning, in elementary, high school, adult, and criminal learning — all fragmented. Nobody is concerned with learning as a whole. I think we are moving into a time when we need that.
Why was it Rachel Carson in 1967 and not 20 years earlier or later? Because that was the moment when new forces — especially technology — were overwhelming the traditional ways of handling the problems that relate to environmentalism. Technology was forcing a crisis, and also offering solutions. Automobile emissions were a technological problem, but it took more advanced technology to control them.
Something analogous is happening with learning. When I was a kid, my parents — even though my father was a scientist — gave no thought to how to teach mathematics. That was the school’s business. The teacher was the professional. But now, you open a magazine or turn on the television and you’re bombarded with ads for software that promises to teach your child math without them even knowing it. Parents are being asked to make decisions that previously belonged to someone else. That division of responsibility between parent and teacher, school and home — it’s disappearing. And this is one of many boundaries that are disappearing.
The boundary between adults and children, for instance: how many families now turn to the kid when the VCR won’t work or the computer crashes? Once upon a time, adults knew and kids were taught. Now something has reversed — and it’s embarrassing for some and delightful for others. The kids know something we don’t know. And not childish things — something everyone agrees is of the greatest importance. These are examples of a broader breakdown of compartmentalization.
It’s not a matter of whether this is happening — it is happening. The question is whether we do something about it, whether we face it, diagnose it, and act.
So let’s come back to computers for seventh graders. One of the wonderful things about computers in people’s lives is that many kids are now having richer learning experiences at home than at school — and that should bother us.
[Audience laughter]
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Dr. Papert: This can play out in two ways. One way — which we are seeing — is that the kid who has this richer experience at home comes into school and is disaffected, because the school isn’t acknowledging it, and the disaffection spreads. The other way — which happens in some schools, but unfortunately not most — is that the kid comes in with that rich experience, shares it, teaches other kids, and it becomes part of a shared learning experience. Home enriches school and school enriches home. The kid becomes the driving force of educational change.
This is where many of the reversals occur. Who’s the learner? Who’s the teacher? Who’s the driving force for education reform — some philosopher like John Dewey, some psychologist like Piaget, or is it the kid? It’s increasingly the kid. And this “kid power” is flowing into schools now, creating pressure — either for change or for disruption. It’s up to us.
Putting laptops in students’ hands is a step in that direction. It acknowledges the shifting locus of learning and of responsibility — between school and home, curriculum and non-curriculum, play and work, fun and serious endeavor. These artificial divisions are beginning to dissolve.
Let me just touch on some of the major objections I’ve heard. One is: “Before you give kids those computers, you should first train the teachers how to use them.” What an insult to teachers.
I have a friend on Deer Isle — a lobster fisherman — whose wife picks crabmeat. They bought a computer because they were dissatisfied with their child’s schooling and decided to home-school. The wife decided to master the computer, and I’ve never seen anyone so persistent in navigating those horrible technical support lines — you know, “Press 1 for this, press 2 for that,” and by the time you get to option eight you’ve forgotten why you called, then they put you on hold. But she persisted, called and called, until she could use these tools better than many computer science students. She didn’t need a course. She read and did. And she has no college degree.
So why can’t teachers do what she did? Of course they can. Sixty percent of American homes have computers. Many of those people aren’t using them to their full potential — but a minute fraction ever took a course on how to use them. They use computers better than if they’d been trained. It’s fine to train circus tigers, because you want them all to do the same thing. You don’t want to train teachers that way — any more than you want teachers to train children that way.
The whole point of these laptops in every kid’s hand is that teachers can use their own imagination to experiment with different ways of teaching and learning, to break away from the centralized command system. I believe we’ll see a flourishing — as we’ve seen in many places where something similar has been implemented on a smaller scale. I’ve heard of perhaps 100,000 laptop computers already deployed in projects where every student has one, and we see wonderful things happening in all kinds of environments — from relatively affluent private schools to some of the roughest, most socially disrupted settings.
The notion of “train the teachers first, then give the kids computers” has things exactly backwards. It’s a classic example of trying to see the new through the tunnel vision of the old. It denies what’s most wonderful about the new situation: the opportunity for people to use their imagination, to learn new things with new tools, to be genuinely creative.
So, let me offer a classification of the objections I’ve seen in the newspapers.
Some come from people who simply don’t see that we’re going to have to change our ways of thinking about learning. If you think the future will look like the past, there’s nothing more to say.
Others accept that something new is coming, but want to do the new thing in the old way.
And then there’s a last category — some rather funny objections, like: “Kids will lose them.” I’ve read quite a few letters to the press from parents saying, “My kid loses her gloves everywhere — think what she’ll do with a computer.” I’ll admit something: my wife gave me a beautiful set of leather gloves for Christmas, and I lost them fairly quickly. I lose gloves. I lose hats. I don’t lose my laptop.
We give teenagers bicycles; they lose their gloves, they don’t lose their bicycles. They don’t lose their Gameboys. And across the several hundred thousand laptops already in the hands of students — in well-off schools and in very poor, socially disrupted ones — kids look after them. In some of the roughest environments, parents go out of their way to protect their children’s computers.
These objections are not serious. They come from resistance to change — and I can’t entirely blame people. Think about this: most of us in this room spent more than 20 years in school. If you started at preschool around four or five, went through K–12, college, maybe graduate or professional school, that easily adds up to more than 20 years. You’d be well into your 40s before the time you’d spent outside school equaled the time you spent inside it. That impression of school as necessarily being what it is — that’s a hard thing to shake off. But that is the effort we have to make.
Rather than talk about standards for learning, let’s set ourselves the harder standard: being willing to envision alternative futures that don’t look like what we’ve had.
[Audience applause]
Jim: Questions, rebuttals, amendments? Yes.
Speaker 4: Just one more objection. What do you think of the concern that kids will become addicted and obsessed with increasingly realistic computer games?
Dr. Papert: That is a genuine danger — and it’s happening anyway. This initiative isn’t going to change the fact that kids are going to get and play computer games. But I think the integrated approach — where the home computer connects to what they’re doing at school — gives you the opportunity to offer them more interesting and exciting things to do with a computer.
At the moment, school can offer kids no alternative to games. That’s another weakness: kids prefer games to doing serious creative things with the computer. But at the Maine Youth Center, we have kids who don’t succeed well in traditional schooling, and they are rising to the challenge of making their own games. We have a rule there: if you make it, you can play it. They learn enough programming and enough of the mathematics needed — coordinates on screen, shapes, directions — to actually build a game, and they are highly motivated to do it.
So I think this addiction to games reflects exactly what we’re trying to change. It’s another symptom of the same problem, not an argument against the solution.
Speaker 5: The image that came to me when you talked about vision was something like a post-Gutenberg era. Teachers, I think, are still locked into a kind of worship of the printed word — and maybe that carries over into a desire to control the system by controlling the methodology of teaching.
Dr. Papert: Yes, and worse: our very definition of knowledge has become “what can be written down in answer to a question.” That is what we test, after all. So can we be surprised if kids and teachers come to believe that’s what knowledge is? But that is a relatively minor kind of knowledge. Yet it’s entirely what we test to determine whether our schools are succeeding.
Writing and language are wonderful things. But a great deal of knowledge is not only not written down — it isn’t even linguistic or verbal.
Speaker 6: Help me understand what that seventh grade classroom will actually look like. What will I see if I walk in?
Dr. Papert: Let me give a concrete example, fresh in my mind. At the Youth Center, we give kids a range of technologies — motors, gears, sensors, and the programmable Lego system they can use to control physical objects. Using these, they can build little robots: vehicles with light sensors that follow a flashlight. We can get six and seven year olds doing quite sophisticated engineering.
So, a first image: here are kids making things — much more sophisticated things than children their age could make without modern technology.
It never works the first time. So they run into problems, and they have to overcome them — by thinking, by trying, by asking someone, by looking in a book or on the web. They find the knowledge they need when they need it. That runs directly against the curriculum’s model of “you will learn this piece of knowledge because it is May 7th and you are in eighth grade.” Instead: you will learn this because you want to and need to.
It might be mechanical building. That sounds gendered, but this morning I gave the example of two girls who built a simulated kitten. Or it might be making a movie — with modern technology you can shoot video, edit it, and produce something that looks genuinely professional. To do any of this, you need a wide range of knowledge — including knowledge that our schools are very bad at giving: how to manage a project that unfolds over time.
Here’s one of the projects at the Youth Center: build a vehicle that climbs the steepest possible slope. They have been working on it for many more weeks than we expected, and the results are remarkable. I’ve asked mechanical engineers what they thought the steepest climbable slope for a Lego vehicle might be.
Gary Stager: The four-foot-long car does better than 90 degrees.
Dr. Papert: So they’ve solved serious mechanical problems. But I want to emphasize a particular aspect of how we set this up. You build your vehicle, you increase the slope until it fails. When it fails, you write on the whiteboard: failed — and why. There are basically four reasons a vehicle can fail. It fell off. It stalled — couldn’t move. It skidded. It broke.
Each cause of failure leads to a different powerful concept. If it fell off, that’s a question of equilibrium, center of gravity, balance. After the first week, nobody’s vehicle was falling off anymore, because they all understood center of gravity well enough. If it stalled, that’s about torque, mechanical advantage, gearing — go slower, gain force. If it broke, that’s structural engineering. If it slipped, that’s friction.
Each of these scientific concepts is being studied in a deeper way than in school — but they are the same fundamental powerful ideas, integrated not by their place in a curriculum but by their relevance to a project the kids actually care about.
And there’s one moment I love particularly. One of these kids — who I consider a brilliant mind trapped in special ed — was one of the first to build a steep-climbing vehicle according to the rules. Then one day he slipped up to the teacher and quietly asked: “Could we define exactly what ‘climbing the slope’ means?”
The teacher took him seriously, and the class had a discussion. They decided: you draw a line, and the front wheels have to cross it. That counts.
The kid went away and started building something strange. What he built was a vehicle four feet long — much longer than the ramp. The front wheels crossed the line. The back wheels were still on the ground.
Gary: I’ll show you.
Dr. Papert: Everyone said: “Cheating!” But it opened a wonderful discussion about what kind of cheating is actually cheating. He was playing seriously with the idea of what “climbing the slope” means — a genuinely important intellectual move. He had first followed the rules, and then he broke out of the box. I thought it was magnificent. Could that show up on the MEA? That’s the kind of excitement you’d see — not just occasional excitement, but an understanding that between the moments of breakthrough, there’s a long hard struggle. That, too, is something they’re learning.
Speaker 6: I can just follow up. What I see in your example is a radical transformation of what it means to teach and to learn — and I’d argue that could happen without a laptop, in lots of different classrooms.
Dr. Papert: There wasn’t a laptop in that classroom.
Speaker 6: Right.
Dr. Papert: But it couldn’t happen with the technology available when you were in school. The point is, technology doesn’t do anything by itself — I’ve written a paper called “Technocentrism” about exactly that error, shared equally by critics and utopians. A computer doesn’t do anything on its own, but it makes possible things that people couldn’t do otherwise.
We don’t ask “what does printing do?” You can read pornography or fascist propaganda, or you can read lyrical poetry and romantic idealism. The technology is a medium.
Speaker 8: A computer is only a tool — you can only do as much with it as the person using it wants to put in. What’s the use of giving computers to students who aren’t intrinsically motivated? And what about teachers who are reluctant to use technology? Don’t we need a change in attitude more than a change in technology?
Dr. Papert: That’s a complicated, many-sided question. But let me start here: do you know anyone who is not motivated to do anything? I don’t. Everyone is motivated to do what they care about. There are no small children who aren’t motivated to learn — they come into the world as highly motivated learners.
We teach them to be unmotivated. We do it by forcing them into a mold that may not fit them. If the mold happens to fit what they love, they do wonderfully. If it doesn’t fit, they do very badly. The fault is in the mold.
The kids at the Youth Center couldn’t be less motivated as school students — but there isn’t one who isn’t motivated to do some of the things we offer. We give them a wide enough range, and one might be motivated to build the vehicles while another is motivated to photograph and document and analyze. They’re all motivated.
Now, might some teachers — and even some kids — still remain unmotivated despite this? Yes. But that can’t be taken as an objection. If those teachers weren’t motivated to put themselves out for kids before, some of them may still not be. We aren’t any worse off with respect to them. But we’re much better off with respect to the rest. If we increase the proportion of motivated learners and teachers from X% to 2X% — or even X + 1% — that’s pure gain. The fact that we won’t reach 100% is not a reason not to try.
Speaker 8: But what about people whose motivation lies entirely away from computers? They’re motivated to do things that don’t involve laptops.
Dr. Papert: This isn’t about computers. Let me tell you a little story.
One of the first times we put a lot of computers in a school — this was in the early ’80s — a graduate student of mine surveyed the kids: “What are you doing?” In the first week, they all said, “Computer.” Two months later, they said, “Logo” — the programming language they were using — so they’d moved one step away from the technology. Six months later, none of them said computer or Logo. They said things like, “I’m making a game,” or “I’m making a simulation.” The computer had become transparent — just an extension of themselves.
If you ask a poet what they’re doing, they’re very unlikely to say, “I’m using a pencil” — even if they are. They’ll say, “I’m writing poetry.”
The computer is a universal instrument. Musicians use it, writers use it, poets use it, scientists, mathematicians, geographers, managers, CEOs — everyone. It’s not tied to one domain. And that’s exactly why “computer literacy” falls short — teaching specific uses of a computer misses the point. The wonder of the computer is that it’s profoundly universal and flexible. Whatever you are interested in, this thing can serve that interest, enrich it, help you do it better, connect it to other knowledge, and help you share it. It becomes a learning experience as much as a specific achievement.
Speaker 9: Given everything you’ve described — all the reasons for resistance, and the way people have reacted to this initiative — what would your advice be for helping people think about learning based on the future rather than the past?
Dr. Papert: We don’t solve it. We can’t solve it. We have to give up the attitude that we can. Putting these computers into everybody’s hands means letting them do it.
That’s why I think putting laptops in the hands of all kids and all teachers has this potentially brilliant cascading effect: first 10%, then next year 20%, and instead of an epidemic of learning disabilities, we get an epidemic of people creating and inventing ways of using these tools. What we have to do is liberate the spirit of enterprise, initiative, imagination, and creativity — and they will come.
In all my years — and I’ve been in this business of computers and kids longer than almost anyone, since the 1960s, when I was accused of being an elitist for trying to use public money on something that “could only benefit the children of millionaires” — every time I go into a place with kids using computers, with real time and freedom to use them, something takes me by surprise. Something I’ve never seen before. That’s honestly true.
Isn’t it, Gary?
Gary Stager: Always.
Dr. Papert: It’s impossible to go into a place with a lot of kids with the tools and the time and the freedom, without their doing something you never thought of. That’s why I believe in the future — because kids are so wonderfully inventive. And not only kids: teachers, adults, everyone. We just have to give them the instruments and remove the constraints.
Speaker 10: I’m trying to understand whether this is just another method for helping children learn — the way that, say, some kids don’t learn well from oral note-taking…
Dr. Papert: No, no — it’s not a method. Or rather, it’s not merely a method, and that’s not the essence.
In education, there have always been debates: should you teach reading by phonics or whole language? Should you teach science by discovery or by lecture? The big difference between all of those debates and what I’m describing is this: all of those assume you’ve decided what you want the kids to know, and you’re asking which method gets them there. I’m saying something different: let the kids follow their own interests, and my role as educator is to show how those interests connect to important ideas, deeper knowledge, and broader wisdom.
That’s what “turning it upside down” means. It’s not teaching the same thing by a different method — it’s a different dynamic entirely. The learner chooses what to learn based on what they’re passionate about, and I, as educator, help them deepen that.
If you’re passionately into music, I’ll teach you mathematics by helping you use the computer to make music — turning mathematics into an instrument that serves your interest. Call it a different method if you like, but it’s a very different method. And more than that, it reflects a different vision of what kids should learn.
Take the example of kids building sophisticated machines that follow light, move around complex paths — little robots that six- or seven-year-olds can construct and program. The knowledge involved in that includes things currently only taught at the college level to engineering students. We have this established sequence: first arithmetic, then algebra, then calculus, then physics, then engineering. Turn that completely upside down: start with engineering — making things — and the physics and mathematics emerge from that. They are means to an end. And then you step back, look at what you’ve used, and formalize it.
This seems like a crazy idea I invented. It is not. It’s how it happened in history. Mathematics didn’t begin with people learning to add, do fractions, and then find applications. It began with the Egyptians predicting the Nile’s floods, building pyramids, managing trade — doing things — and mathematics emerged as a particularly powerful way of doing those things. Then it became increasingly abstracted until it became the beautiful structure of pure thought we know today.
Because of the limitations of traditional teaching methods, we’ve been forced in school to invert the natural order — to present an artificial pedagogical sequence that is out of step with both the historical order and the natural conceptual order. Technology allows us to go back to the natural way. With these tools, kids can actually use powerful, modern, sophisticated knowledge — not just receive it passively. They can build with it, apply it, and make it their own.
That is a difference not in teaching method, but in the fundamental approach to knowledge, and in what we believe knowledge is actually for.
Speaker 10: Thank you.